Moriarty Returns a Letter (3 page)

“Wait,” said Redgil now. “Just how long is this going to take?”

The skinny man shrugged. “I read the last one in just two days,” he said, with some pride.

Redgil shook his head. “Take your damn magazine over there,” he said, pointing at the little table. “When you’ve figured out what it’s about, assuming it happens before the sun comes up, then give us the short version.”

The skinny man did as he was told, and went to the table, his eyes fixed on the page of the magazine even as he walked.

Meantime, Redgil picked up the bill of lading, brought it over to the American, and stuck it in front of his face.

“Sign this. Make it over to bearer, so I can present it to the ship’s captain and take possession.”

The American shook his head. “That’s not our deal. I’ll sign it over when you bring the money to the dock and I get my twenty-five percent.”

“Of course you’ll get your cut. Why wouldn’t you? You will. I promise. You have my word. As a gentleman.”

The American just snorted defiantly.

Redgil nodded to the brute, and the rope came down on the American’s back again.

The pain ran in shivers down his back, into his legs, and then back up again to his head, nearly causing him to pass out. He fought to stay conscious. He raised his head and looked directly at Redgil.

“You are making a very serious mistake,” said the American. “I am not alone. Do you think I work with no one but you, that I have no confederates? I have schemes in place everywhere in this city. You know that. I don’t take credit by name, but it’s me that makes it happen. You know and I know that you cannot cheat me and leave me alive. But my operatives are everywhere, and if you kill me, I will be avenged.”

Redgil just sneered when the American said those things. But the skinny man—still slowly working his way through “The Final Problem” in
The Strand
—looked up now when he heard the threat. He looked back down at the text he was reading—then across at the American—and then at the text again.

Then he got up and came over, the opened magazine in his hand. He stared at the American.

“What is your real name?”

The American looked up. The skinny man’s face had a look not just of suspicion but also something very much like awe—as though he were wondering whether he should bow down in front of the American before it was too late.

Once more the skinny man looked at the text he had been reading, and then up at the American and then back at the text again.

Page two, thought the American. He’s reached page two. It was just far enough.

“If you’re reading that,” said the American, nodding toward the copy of
The Strand,
with all the quiet menace he could muster, “you know damn well know what my name is.”

The skinny man’s eyes grew wide. He stepped back from the American as though the man was a bonfire that had gotten too big. He turned toward Redgil.

“What now?” said Redgil.

The skinny man displayed the magazine in front of Redgil, and jabbed his finger at the relevant page.

“Moriarty!”

“What are you talking about?”

“He is Professor Moriarty! The Napoléon of crime! It says so, right here!” The skinny man read aloud from the magazine, pointing at portions of the text and displaying them in front of Redgil’s face, to Redgil’s great annoyance.

“‘He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web.… He does little himself. He only plans. But his agents are numerous and splendidly organized. Is there a crime to be done, a paper to be abstracted, we will say, a house to rifled, a man to be removed—the word is passed to the Professor, the matter is organized and carried out.’”

Redgil, growing more impatient by the second, ripped the journal out of the skinny man’s hands. He shoved it in front of the American’s face:

“Well?” he demanded. “Out with it. Is this you, then?”

With an intense effort of will, the American agent got his breathing completely under control. He composed his face completely. He even stopped sweating. He looked at Redgil directly and calmly and then smiled a very cold, minimal smile and said:

“You may hope that it is not. Your hope is in vain.”

“Oh, bloody hell,” said the skinny man. “We are done, we are done. His agents will do for us all!”

“Shut the bloody hell up!” shouted Redgil. “I need to think.”

To make that process easier, apparently, he turned away and pushed on his own forehead with the palms of his hands as if to force a thought. He stroked a reddish birthmark that ran parallel with his jaw on his right cheek. Then he turned back and stared for a long moment at the American.

And then he motioned the other two men in the room—that is, everyone who was not shackled to the post—into the far corner. He spoke in a whisper, almost softly enough that the shackled man couldn’t hear.

“Maybe he is Moriarty, and maybe he ain’t. But we can’t cut him loose, either way. We’ve already gone too bloody far. But no one has to know it was us that did it. First we get him to sign the cargo over to us, and then we throw his body in front of a bloody train or something.”

The man with the rope grunted. The skinny man nodded eagerly.

Then they all three came back to the shackled man.

Redgil thrust the bill of lading at him.

“I don’t give a damn farthing who you really are,” said Redgil. “You sign this! Make it over to bearer, so that I can present it to the ship’s captain and take possession.”

The American glared up at Redgil, and said:

“I need a writing surface.”

Redgil looked puzzled for a moment.

“Surely you don’t expect me to sign in thin air?” said the American, with a nod toward the little wooden table.

Redgil considered it.

“Well, we sure as hell ain’t cutting you loose,” he said. Then he turned to the skinny man. “Bring that table over here.”

The skinny man picked up the kerosene lamp and handed it to the man with the rope, and then cleared the remaining items from the little table. Then the skinny man brought the table over and set it down next to Redgil and the American.

“I can’t bend down that far,” said the American, standing up straight, still shackled to the post. “Little problem with my back.”

The skinny man ran back and got the little three-legged stool that went with the table. He set it down in position for the American.

“May I?” said the American to Redgil, in a voice dripping with sarcasm.

Redgil growled something unintelligible.

The American slid down, both hands still tied to the post, and sat on the little stool. He positioned himself at the table as if for afternoon tea, and looked up at Redgil.

“If you want me to sign, I think you’ll need to untie me. One hand, at least.”

Redgil looked at the bloody, battered wreck of a man who claimed to be Moriarty, and decided he could take just that much of a chance. He motioned to the man with the rope to cut one arm loose.

The American flexed his fingers and wrist, as if to get the circulation running again.

Then the skinny man dipped the pen into the inkwell and held it in front of the American’s face. A black drop of ink fell from the metal pen nib onto the table, where a small pool of the American’s blood was already beginning to soak into the wood.

The American took the pen and, with as steady a hand as he could manage, he began to sign an endorsement on the bill of lading.

“There’s a good lad,” said Redgil.

The American had one hand free, the hand holding the pen. And time was up.

He signed. But he did not make the endorsement to bearer, as Redgil demanded. He made it to someone else. Come hell or high water, and one of those was surely about to come, he was going to maintain his newly invented cover story. If it didn’t save his life, it might save someone else’s.

Now, with his free hand holding the pen, the American used his shackled hand to push the signed bill of lading across the table to Redgil. And then the American allowed his head to drop, as though finally succumbing to unconsciousness.

Redgil sneered at the American, picked up the document, and turned away.

In the three months that he had been working with Redgil’s team, the American agent had never allowed any of them to see him do anything more physically impressive than launch a chewed wad of tobacco into the spittoon from a distance of four feet. No bar fights—he avoided them. No climbing along second-story windowsills to complete a burglary—he left that to the skinny man. No pickup games of cricket in the street, though he had dearly wanted to, because he’d played damn good stickball growing up in Hell’s Kitchen.

With his shirt off, they might have picked up a hint that he was something other than just a planner of crimes. But if there was one characteristic of this lot that was stronger than their suspicion, it was their arrogance. And that was only compounded by the fact that they thought he was now about two breaths away from death’s door.

Of course, at this point, that was pretty much his own assessment as well.

All the more reason he had nothing to lose.

The small table—no more than three feet by two—was in front of him; he was seated on the little three-legged stool they had brought over at his insistence.

Two feet away, directly across the table from the American, Redgil was unable to read the bill of lading, and so, as the American had expected, he was turning to his left, to show the signature to the skinny man.

At the other side of the table was the bulky man, who had left his original position behind the post. That was lucky. He still had the cargo net in his hands.

The American’s left arm was still shackled to the post. Only his right hand was free, and he could only do damage within a radius of about six feet. He twirled the pen in his hand and waited.

“Bloody hell,” cried the skinny man, reading the bill of lading in his hand. “He signed it over to Moriarty! He endorsed it to himself!”

The skinny man and Redgil both came back to the table, and Redgil leaned in angrily toward the American, intending to grab him by the throat.

The agent thrust forward with the pen.

Redgil was the most dangerous of the three men, and the American knew he had to kill him at the outset. He was aiming to put the pen not just into Redgil’s right eye, but through it. But in the American’s woozy state he missed—not by much, but for his target it was the difference between life and death.

Or at least the difference between life with partial blindness as opposed to death—the thrust was still pretty damned close. Redgil screamed in pain and rage, blood streaming from just below his right eye, and his hands went to his face.

The skinny man stepped back, but not quickly enough. The American stood, grabbed the stool by one of its three legs, and swung it hard into the skinny man’s jaw.

Now the American felt the slashing sting of the rope net, and not just on his already-flayed back, but on his face and arms as well. This meant the bulky man had done what the American needed him to do—stayed in close to swing the net.

Before the bulky man could recover from his forward motion in swinging the net, the American pivoted to his left, grabbed the bulky man by the hair on top of his head, and using the man’s own weight slammed his head down into the table.

But now where was Redgil? He was no longer in the American’s field of vision, which meant he must have circled behind, where he could attack with his knife from the protection of the post to which the American was shackled. That was a damned shame. The American knew exactly what Redgil would do now, and he tried to turn to prevent it.

But too late.

2

SCOTLAND YARD, A FEW DAYS LATER

Inspector Standifer of Special Branch was in his new office, at the newly constructed Metropolitan Police Service headquarters. It was a splendid building, five stories of red and white brick, and with his recent promotion the inspector actually had an office with a window.

But he was too worried to enjoy the surroundings. He got up from his chair and paced to that window; he looked down at the pedestrians and the clattering hansom cabs on Victoria Embankment, in the same way that someone waiting anxiously for a train looks down the tracks—but he saw nothing hopeful.

He went back and sat in his chair, just as a letter carrier from the Royal Mail arrived. The young man stood hesitating in the doorway.

“Well, what is it then?” said the inspector.

“It’s another letter, sir. Addressed to—well, you know.”

Standifer sighed. He had more important matters on his mind, but he accepted the letter. He looked at the address and nodded. And then he carefully paused before opening the envelope.

He had established a protocol for these. He felt obliged to follow through on it, even if no one in authority from the Royal Mail ever came around to officially check.

“This letter is addressed to 221B Baker Street,” said the inspector. “Have you attempted to deliver it there?”

“I have, sir,” said the letter carrier from the Royal Mail, who knew the ritual quite well. “But there is no 221B Baker Street.”

“This letter is addressed to a Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Did you attempt to locate that person so that you could deliver it to him?”

“I did, sir. But I found no Sherlock Holmes to whom it could be delivered.”

“Very well then,” said the inspector. “Scotland Yard will accept the letter on his behalf.”

They had gone through this ritual several times in the past two years, ever since the publication of a short novel called
A Study in Scarlet,
by the now-famous Arthur Conan Doyle.

At first, the inspector knew, the lads at the Royal Mail had just looked at the name of the addressee, held the letters up to a lamp, and had a good laugh. Most of the letters—a request for more details about the proper use of plaster casts for footprints, an inquiry regarding the monograph by Mr. Sherlock Holmes on tobacco types and their origins—they simply sent on to Arthur Conan Doyle himself.

But then the confessions had begun to roll in. Small crimes, mostly, but it wouldn’t do to ignore them. And those letters the Royal Mail brought to the Yard.